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Forward Thinking
is a charitable organisation addressing issues related to the Middle East Peace Process and religious/secular dialogue.

Contents

It has three main aims

and two main areas of activities

The prime focus of Forward Thinking's work in the Middle East is to promote a more inclusive peace process through dialogue with key Israeli and Palestinian stakeholders and political/religious leaders who previously had been unengaged. Forward Thinking works to engage with those who are perceived as religious or political "hardliners, in the belief that a durable peace agreement in the region requires the full participation of all political and faith-based leaders at each stage of the process.
[1]

Forward Thinking's key aims in the Middle East Programme are:

Forward Thinking’s Political Dialogues refer to the spaces they provide to promote dialogue between together diverse constituencies, to work towards developing greater understanding, mutual respect and strengthening co-existence.

Forward Thinking seek to work at multiple levels and in diverse settings, engaging key constituencies from across the religious and secular divide, including: government officials, parliamentarians, political leaders, prominent figures from the financial/business community and civil society activists. Through this active mediation Forward Thinking attempt to bring together leaders that hold real constituency within their respective communities to try and bridge gaps that are often perceived as insurmountable. They try to facilitate engagement and design a process aimed at moving from “dialogue to action”. Through dialogue, participants can discover the minimum level of consensus that enables them to act together in promoting mutually desirable goals.
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Forward Thinking have several different political dialogues, including:

The Tunisian Process

In Tunisia, Forward Thinking have established and facilitate an ongoing dialogue focused on supporting political leaders develop sufficient consensus to address the challenges and mistrust that risk hindering the political transition to a fully multi party democratic state.

The Policy Forum

Forward Thinking have initiated a regional dialogue that brings together senior political, governmental and economic officials from across Europe and the Arab/Muslim world. The purpose is to address some of the growing political and economic challenges that can destabilise countries in transition. By providing a regular space for open and frank exchanges our goal is to create a network of influential leaders who can help deepen the mutual understanding and develop more informed and creative policy responses.

Forward Thinking are also in the process of establishing a broader network of secular and religious political leaders from across the Arab/Muslim to meet regularly with European and US, parliamentarians and diplomats, so as to enable them to examine together the challenges and misperceptions posed by the religious and secular political divide that some claim underpins much of the political instability in the MENA and Gulf region.

Study treatments

Basalin (Gan Lee Pharmaceutical, Beijing, China) and Lantus (Sanofi, Paris, France) are both provided in a 100 IU/mL concentration by the manufacturers. Both insulin glargines are provided with an injection pen; the GanLee Pen (Gan Lee Pharmaceutical) for Basalin and the SoloSTAR®/ClikSTAR® (Sanofi) for Lantus.

Measurements and data collection

Data were retrospectively harvested from EMRs collected in the hospital information system and included demographics, medical history, details of medication including pre-hospitalization treatment regimen and concomitant use of oral antidiabetic drugs (OAD), laboratory measurements such as glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) and daily blood glucose measurements, and safety data. Raw data were encoded by a trained member of staff. Daily blood glucose control was evaluated using seven-point blood glucose, comprised of fasting blood glucose levels (FBG) before breakfast, and blood glucose levels post-breakfast, pre- and post- lunch and dinner, and pre-bed.

Blood glucose measurements were conducted by hospital staff from finger-stick blood samples and using the Nova StatStrip system (Nova Biomedical, MA, USA). Hypoglycemia was defined as any recorded incidence of blood glucose ≤3.9 mmol/L, and severe hypoglycemia as blood glucose ≤2.8 mmol/L.

Statistical methods

Two subgroup analyses were performed; in patients who received basal-bolus therapy with Basalin and prandial insulin as their initial therapy (excluding patients who received OADs), and for patients who switched from Basalin to Lantus due to suboptimal glycemic control as recorded in their medical record.

At baseline, the majority of the study patients were middle aged or older, with a mean body mass index of 27.4 kg/m
2
and a mean duration of diabetes mellitus (DM) of 9.1 years (
Table 1
). Metabolic control was poor in most patients, indicated by an average HbA1c of 8.9%, and FBG of 9.98 mmol/L, at hospital admission. Diabetic complications had been reported in 86.3% of patients, and 38.4% had a history of cardiovascular disease. The mean duration of hospitalization was 22.3 days. Initial treatment with Basalin insulin glargine was received in combination with prandial insulin for the majority of patients (84.9%). The most common reason for switching to Lantus as recorded in patients’ medical records was suboptimal glycemic control (30.1%), followed by patient decision (4.1%).

Another way of thinking about how the world has changed is to consider the dichotomy between content and context. Had you asked me a decade ago about how we might preserve newspapers (a term that seems so old-fashioned now) in the digital age, I would have said that we need to have stewardship institutions ingest the content databases, including the revision histories of the content. Today, depending on “who” (individually and demographically) a news Web site thinks you are, and your history with the site, it will customize a set of featured articles; this is the end of a long, technologically enabled evolution that starts with early/late and regional editions. So context of the interaction is now critical. It often doesn’t matter much if some bit of content is in the database, but only a minuscule fraction of the site’s visitors see it, and perhaps only if they specifically search for it. It’s the highly visible materials that have the most social impact.

Here are a few popularly discussed (and far from exhaustive) examples of ways in which the pervasive “Age of Algorithms” is now upon us:

An additional area that’s slightly different in character from the examples above has moved into prominence in recent months: understanding of the role of information warfare in the 2016 election and in other elections around the world in recent years. Here, it’s clear that we need to better understand both the vulnerabilities of existing social media platforms (, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and the roles and functions of algorithmically driven aggressors (botnets) as well as networks of human actors in delivering messages to users of these platforms [
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].

It’s important to recognize that many of these algorithmic outcomes do not rise to the level of regulatory or policy scrutiny (at least at the U.S. federal or, occasionally, state levels), or they do so only in very specific, blatant or extreme cases [
12
]. Some of the examples above are clearly very high stakes situations; others are not. Poor or skewed movie recommendations from Netflix, or a bad book suggestion from Amazon, or an annoying entry in a Facebook feed probably isn’t very important, though we have learned that huge numbers of individually low-stakes decisions can add up to very societally serious results, as the 2016 U.S. presidential election has made clear [
13
], when compared to systematic gender or racial bias in recommended trial sentences, loan approvals, or medical diagnoses. Various forms of price discrimination, frequently driven by ever-more-detailed information about individual consumers, are now regarded as effective and laudable business practice (Shapiro and Varian, 1999; Useem, 2017) if they are conducted appropriately [
14
]. Nevertheless, understanding and documenting such personalized and targeted system behaviors might be of real interest to consumers and consumer advocacy groups in the present, and certainly to scholars in the future (even if there’s nothing legally very questionable about them) for the insight that they give into behaviors of the population and the way opinion is shaped and choices are made.

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